Results tagged “diving”

China's national games haven't even officially started yet, but they are already the backdrop for an ugly scandal in one of the country's most treasured sports. Don't worry--diving queen Guo Jingjing's piles of Olympic gold aren't in jeopardy. But the integrity of the sport's biggest domestic competition was shaken when a referee quit working the national games because, she says, the result are all fixed.

    

Last week, China's diving team announced that it would skip the upcoming FINA Grand Prix in Fort Lauderdale due to swine flu fears.

The second career of Chinese diver-turned-actor Tian Liang has so far been received tepidly, but his latest role has sparked a big debate in China. Tian, a gold medalist in platform diving at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney and a bronze medalist in Athens, has been chosen to play Lei Feng, a soldier held up by Mao as an example of selflessness for all of China to follow. The choice of Tian for the role has angered a host of Chinese netizens, who basically argue that Tian is too self-centered, materialistic and publicity-loving to play Lei Feng. Tian was kicked off the Chinese diving team ahead of the 2008 Olympics for too enthusiastically pursuing commercial activities.

After table tennis, diving was the sport that China dominated most during the 2008 Beijing Olympics. So this weekend, when the city of Changzhou hosts the China stop on this year's FINA Diving Grand Prix series, a good spectator turnout is expected, as well as some very high-caliber diving.

If Guo Jingjing (郭晶晶) isn't in the pool, she must be in the tabloids. Post-Olympic rumors have the diver taking her gold medals and moving to Hong Kong, where the buzz is that she may marry her boyfriend Kenneth Fok and compete for Hong Kong in the 2012 Olympics.

Going into the final dives of the men's 10-meter platform competition, it looked like China was about to sweep all eight diving gold medals, with Zhou Luxin and Huo Liang in first and second place. But Australia's Matthew Mitcham, trailing the leader Zhou by more than 30 points, went for broke with a 3.8 degree of difficulty dive, a back two and a half somersault with two and a half twists. He got four perfect 10s and scored 112.10, the highest score in the history of Olympic diving, to snatch the gold from his Chinese competitors. Mitcham is the only openly gay man competing at these Olympics.

There's a pretty sweet interactive feature on the NY Times website right now that let's the reader have a virtual experience atop the 10M diving platform at the National Aquatic Center (aka "Water Cube"). It includes a minute long audio description from American Olympic diver Thomas Finchum, but the real highlight is playing around with the panorama. We wish we could be there ourselves except we're afraid of heights. And water. And mobs of people. And oh yeah, we're not Olympics athletes, so this will be a nice alternative.

"An adult giant panda usually created 10 kilograms of faeces perday, however, now it only produced 2-3 kg because of scarce food, said Wang."

Diving queen Guo Jingjing (郭晶晶) has been slammed left right and centre for her less than stellar behaviour at a press conference after taking home the silver for the women's 3m springboard final at the "Good Luck Beijing" FINA Diving World Cup where she was edged out by team mate Wu Minxia (吴敏霞).